THe Fear of Falling: British Politics and Imperial Decline Since 1900

Abstract

TO an outsider historians must sometimes seem perversely obsessed with decline. Certainly when it comes to dealing with empires, his-torians betray a fascination with decay that is almost pathological—and often not simply with the nature and causes of decline but with the exact moment when it began—a somewhat futile enterprise if an enjoyable parlour game. Of course the appeal of decay to the his-torical imagination is not simply the outgrowth of contemporary nostalgia for lost worlds and past times. In the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries the intellectual habit of ‘historical-mindedness’ and the particular tendency to search for a pattern of origins, growth, maturity, decline and fall were extremely influential over a wide range of intellectual disciplines and we might suppose helped to shape the world-view of those who managed the external affairs of Britain and the other powers. The search for historical laws of civilisation and decay was a characteristically Victorian intellectual preoccupation and an essential part of the way in which Europeans tried to make sense of the other civilisations into which they crashed during the nineteenth century. But how far were the leaders of the European imperial states and the circles of informed opinion in which they moved willing to turn on their own empires the analysis of growth and decay they had fashioned for the states and cultures they had overthrown? To what extent should we see the makers of British policy in the first half of this century as (in Gibbon's famous phrase) ‘musing in the ruins of the Capitol’? Was the Marquess of Lothian's remark that ‘sooner or later empires decay partly because they become rigid and rotten at the centre…’ a recognition that if history was the graveyard of empires, British imperialism had certainly reached retiring age? Or did Lothian and others like him assume that Britain's peculiarities made her exempt from such generalizations?